WEEKEND READING: When academic misconduct becomes an identity: what happens after the sanction?

This blog was kindly authored by Dr Manesha Peiris, Senior Lecturer in Reflective Practice & Project Management at Queen Mary University of London.

Academic integrity has long been and will remain a cornerstone of higher education, and as such, academic misconduct should have consequences. Students who plagiarise, fabricate evidence, collude inappropriately or use Generative AI (GenAI) outside the boundaries established by their institution can undermine academic standards and, ultimately, confidence in the qualifications higher education institutions award. Therefore, higher education institutions have a responsibility to investigate suspected misconduct fairly and impose proportionate sanctions where it is established.

In practice, however, academic misconduct is not only a category of prohibited behaviour. For a student, an allegation can initiate a process in which they are asked to account for how their work was produced, respond to evidence, attend an investigative meeting or panel and wait for a decision that may affect an assessment and, in some cases, their academic progression. Procedures and sanctions differ between institutions, but the experience extends beyond the eventual finding. There is a period in which a student may not yet know whether misconduct will be established, what consequences might follow, or whether their explanation of their own work will be believed.

So let us address an obvious objection at the outset. Asking higher education institutions to consider the human consequences of academic misconduct processes at a policy level is not intended to advocate for leniency or to disregard the foundations of honesty and trust that higher education is built on. Nor should concern for student wellbeing mean that misconduct is excused because investigation or sanction may be distressing. The question is more difficult: what should happen to the student after we have held them accountable?

Academic integrity processes are generally designed to answer three questions: Did misconduct occur? What form did it take? And what sanction should follow? They are less explicit about a fourth: when, and how, is a student permitted to move beyond it? There is an important difference between saying ‘you have committed plagiarism’ and allowing that judgement to become ‘you are a plagiarist’. The first describes an act. The second describes a person.

The sociologist Erving Goffman described stigma as a process through which one discrediting characteristic can come to dominate how somebody is perceived. Applied to this context, it raises an uncomfortable possibility. Once a student’s academic integrity has been questioned, might that finding alter how we understand not only their future work, but their previous achievements? Could an academic sanction acquire a life beyond the penalty itself? For higher education institutions, this is not simply a question of compassion. It is a question about what we believe education is for.

Who is presumed authentic?

This question has become particularly urgent with the rapid emergence of GenAI. Higher education institutions are having to make increasingly difficult distinctions between legitimate assistance and inappropriate substitution. At the same time, judgements about academic authenticity can begin long before misconduct is established. Something has to make a piece of work worthy of scrutiny. Perhaps the writing appears significantly different from a student’s previous work, the vocabulary seems unusually sophisticated, the style changes, an AI-detection tool produces a concerning result, or the work appears inconsistent with what somebody believes that student is capable of producing. None of these observations necessarily demonstrates bias or unfair practice. But they remind us that suspicion is itself produced through judgement.

This distinction will become more important as technologies for establishing the source of text become more sophisticated. Being able to identify that AI has been involved in producing text may tell us something about how that text was produced. It does not necessarily tell us what intellectual contribution the student made, why the technology was used, or what the student is capable of doing without it. We therefore need to distinguish augmentation from substitution.

A student might use GenAI to generate an argument they could not construct themselves. Another might use it to improve expression, interrogate an idea, translate language, organise existing thoughts or overcome barriers to written communication. Institutions may legitimately permit some of these practices and prohibit others. But the important question is whether identifying technological involvement inadvertently becomes a proxy for judging intellectual capability. There is a question of power here. Who receives the benefit of being understood as using AI to augment their capability, and whose use is interpreted as evidence that capability is absent? This is also an equity question because the distinction between augmentation and substitution is not necessarily visible in the finished text; it has to be interpreted. A student writing in a second language may use GenAI to improve expression without outsourcing the underlying argument. A disabled student might use assistive technologies as part of how they ordinarily produce academic work. Another student might use GenAI to organise ideas they have already developed. If unfamiliar fluency, changes in style or technological involvement become reasons to question authenticity, institutions need to consider whether all students are equally likely to have their use of technology understood as legitimate augmentation rather than evidence that the intellectual work is not their own.

As higher education institutions refine their GenAI policies, policymakers and sector bodies should therefore be interested not only in whether misconduct can be detected accurately, but in how institutional definitions of suspicious practice, and the indicators used to identify potentially suspicious work, shape professional judgement about students.

Misconduct is not experienced equally

Academic integrity rules may also be experienced differently across the student population. The Studiosity’s 2026 Student Wellbeing Survey provides an important starting point here. Rather than assuming that an integrity process is experienced simply as an administrative procedure, we should recognise that questions of academic legitimacy occur within a broader relationship between student, institution and belonging.

For some students, academic achievement is closely connected to aspiration, family expectation and confidence that they legitimately belong within higher education. An allegation that calls the authenticity of their work into question can therefore carry meaning beyond the particular assessment concerned. This does not establish that academic integrity procedures cause poor mental health. Nor does it mean that institutions should avoid difficult decisions where students are distressed.

These questions become particularly important where institutional expectations are themselves changing. Students may encounter different rules about GenAI between modules, assessments or forms of academic work, and the boundary between legitimate assistance and inappropriate substitution may not always be self-evident to them. The period between an allegation and its outcome may therefore be particularly difficult, as students continue their studies while facing uncertainty about whether misconduct will be established and what the consequences might be. Being told that a procedure exists is therefore not the same as being equipped to navigate it. Students need to understand what they are alleged to have done, what evidence is being considered, where they can obtain independent advice and how they can challenge a decision they believe is wrong. Students’ Unions, academic advisers and specialist university services can play an important role here, but institutions should also ask whether students feel able to approach those sources of support while their academic integrity is under question.

Procedural consistency should not prevent us from asking whether students possess equal resources to understand allegations, challenge decisions, obtain advice and recover afterwards. The same sanction on paper does not necessarily have the same consequences in practice.

When does the sanction end?

This brings us to the part of academic integrity that receives considerably less attention: reintegration. The criminologist John Braithwaite made a useful distinction between responses to wrongdoing that stigmatise the person and those that condemn the behaviour while allowing the individual to return to the community. Higher education can benefit from taking that distinction seriously because universities are educational communities, and must not forget this when exercising their regulatory responsibilities.  

However, it is important to stress that reintegration does not mean institutional amnesia. Previous misconduct may legitimately matter when considering subsequent misconduct, and institutions should not pretend an offence never occurred. The question is whether that previous finding remains relevant only where it ought to be relevant.

Consider something higher education institutions ordinarily celebrate: academic growth.  A student’s writing becomes more sophisticated, their vocabulary expands, their marks improve and/or their arguments become more confident. For most students, these are signs of learning. But what happens when the student has previously been found responsible for academic misconduct? Could the very improvement higher education is intended to produce become a reason to question whether subsequent work is authentic? That possibility should concern us, as a student should not enter a position in which poor performance confirms assumptions about their capability while substantial improvement generates suspicion about authenticity.

From sanction to reintegration

There is therefore a human element to academic regulation that should be recognised explicitly in policy rather than left to the compassion or discretion of individual members of staff. Our conventional academic integrity pathway might be described as detection, investigation and sanction. The pathway should not end when a sanction is imposed. Learning requires the student to understand what went wrong, why it matters and what they need to do differently in future academic work. Reintegration requires something further: a credible opportunity to demonstrate that learning, rebuild academic trust and participate in the academic community without the previous finding becoming a permanent lens through which their subsequent work is interpreted.

There are benefits here for institutions as well as students. A reintegrative approach creates the possibility that academic integrity becomes part of academic development rather than remaining principally a regulatory encounter. Students who believe that mistakes can be acknowledged and trust rebuilt have a reason to seek advice, disclose uncertainty and change their practices. Institutions, in turn, have an opportunity to make academic integrity something students learn to exercise rather than simply a set of rules they learn not to breach. Reintegration is therefore not in tension with maintaining academic standards. Properly designed, it can contribute to the culture of integrity those standards depend upon.

To enable this, sector bodies and regulators should encourage institutions to examine not only whether academic integrity procedures are fair and sanctions proportionate, but what students are expected to learn following misconduct and how restoration of academic trust occurs. Higher education institutions already provide procedural safeguards: regulations are made available, students may be supported or represented in misconduct proceedings, decisions are communicated, and routes of challenge exist. But procedural provision should not be confused with meaningful access. Students enter these processes with different levels of familiarity with university systems, confidence in challenging institutional authority, and social, cultural and linguistic resources through which to interpret what is being asked of them. The question is therefore not simply whether support and information are available, but whether students are equally equipped to understand and use them. Institutions should examine whether patterns of suspicion, referral and outcomes differ between groups of students, particularly as GenAI creates new categories of apparently suspicious academic practice. And sector guidance on GenAI should maintain a careful distinction between evidence about the provenance of academic work and conclusions about the intellectual capability or character of the person who produced it.

It is worth noting that none of these actions requires a weakening of academic standards. A student who commits serious misconduct may need to experience serious consequences. They may need to acknowledge wrongdoing, change their academic practices and rebuild trust. However, there must remain a route forward. Higher education contributes to the development of people who will eventually leave our institutions and enter professions, communities and public life. That development inevitably includes achievement, but it also includes mistakes, accountability, learning and recovery. Therefore, the responsibility of higher education is not to remove consequences from failure, but to ensure that those consequences remain capable of being educational. Academic integrity asks us to protect the standards of our institutions. Educational integrity should also ask us to consider the people who will eventually leave them.